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LONDON, ONT.—Tory Leader Tim Hudak was urged Sunday to rid the party of its public image of being heartless.

Just as the Progressive Conservative policy convention was about to wrap up for the weekend, a Thornhill delegate told Hudak the party has an image problem.

“We didn’t need a leadership review. What we need is to look at the party image,” she said during a question and answer session Hudak was holding.

“Right now our image is heartless, business oriented, money first, not caring enough about people . . . what can all of us do?”

She referred to a comment made Saturday by a male delegate that NDP Leader Andrea Horwath was “the great pumpkin” and accused her of putting on weight.

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“That’s exactly what we don’t need,” she said.

Not exactly the unbridled high that Hudak was hoping for as the party prepares for a general election, possibly next year.

Hudak, who easily dodged a leadership review, said no party has the market cornered on compassion. He argued that the burgeoning provincial debt under the Liberal government is actually hurting people such as seniors, students and those with disabilities the most.

“We don’t just balance the budget because we are a bunch of accountants. We balance the budget because every dollar that goes to debt interest isn’t going out to some child with a developmental disability who needs a little help to achieve a high quality of life,” he said.

“My opponents will talk about compassion but they rob us of the ability to be compassionate in the first place.”

Much of the talk at the three-day convention centred on the next election and whether this time around the Tories can put a campaign together to knock off the minority Liberal government and regain power for the first time in ten years.

And part of that battle, Hudak says, is to show Ontarians how serious things are.

“Ontario is in an incredible mess,” Hudak told delegates.

“We have gone from being the engine of growth in this country to the caboose. We have a million folks . . . in this province (who) are either unemployed, . . . on welfare, (or) have no job to go to.”

“We are deep in debt and our deficit is actually greater than all the other provinces combined. And it seems like government is all about you working for the government when it should be about government working for the taxpayers, who pay the bills.”

Ontario’s accumulated debt by the end of March 2014 is expected to be $273 billion. The current deficit is $11.9 billion.

Hudak pointed to the 14 policy papers the party has developed and said the Tories at least have a plan on how to run the government, while describing the plans from the Liberals and New Democrats as a “vacuous, vacant agenda.”

A problem for the Tories in the last election was money, but Tony Miele, chair of the PC Ontario Fund said the party in the past couple of years has never taken in so much money in donations.

“We are doing very well. We have raised more money in the last 2 ½ years under Tim Hudak than any other leader ever in Ontario’s history so we are actually quite well off,” he said, adding that the average donation to the Tories is “much higher than the Liberals.”

The Tories’ current debt is $3.2 million, down from about $6 million after the 2011 election.

“We are going to be campaign ready,” Miele told reporters.

The party’s brass has given the Tories a limit of $8 million to spend on an election.

Delegates discussed policy at length behind closed doors, hoping that some of the stranger propositions don’t reach public ears.

One of those obtained by the Star was demanding the spring bear hunt be reinstated in the province after being cancelled in 1999 by the Tory government of Mike Harris.

And a reason given for wanting this was that “there has been a dangerous shift in bear behaviour that now sees bears routinely preying on people in their homes that was unheard of previously.”

The request for reinstatement was approved by the convention delegates.

Liberal MPP Steven Del Duca questioned why the PCs would prohibit the media from sitting in on the policy session.

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